The Original Meepo board - Looking back

I remember having to spend about two weeks without an electric skateboard in the (Australian) summer of 2017. First world problems, I know. But it really did suck!

My board had a broken motor and I didn't have a kit of spares (or several boards) like I do now. You don't realise how many little things you use your board for until it's gone. You miss out on not just the best way to get to and from work every day, but also your leisure activity, your escapism. You miss the simple joys of ducking down to the shops quickly when you're one ingredient short for dinner, zipping up to the bakery on a Sunday or grabbing a quick coffee down the beach. An electric skateboard takes these trivial things and makes them wondrous because of the journey, regardless of the destination.

It was during this period that the thought first crossed my mind, "You need at least two (electric skateboards)..."

​My daily driver at the time (and the broken board in question) was an Evolve Gen2 Bamboo Bustin edition - still one of my most favorite boards. The plan was to buy a new Bamboo GT and relegate the Gen2 to my backup board once the motor was replaced. This plan didn't end up going so well. My brand new Evolve Bamboo GT was a faulty deathtrap upon taking it out of the box! Evolve themselves couldn't fix it. It was possessed! It was eventually returned and refunded; so it was back to the drawing board.

​A few months later I started to pay attention to the buzz being generated on Reddit around a new brand called Meepo. I thought to myself, "Okay, new plan."

​Maybe I could hang on to my Gen2 as my primary board a little longer and get a Meepo as a backup for now; then continue to wait for a better alternative for a new primary board to come along.. Options in Australia were (and still are to a certain degree) quite scarce, so I went ahead with this plan.

It was around this time I also started That Esk8 Life. I wrote two blog posts on the original Meepo board back then. The first one was entitled, 'Why I bought a Meepo board.' The second one was called, 'A week with the Meepo board.' These were my respective 'preview' and 'review' articles for want of a better way to define them.

​Looking back on those now retired articles, I thought I'd share a summary of the key points I covered at the time, as well as my thoughts on how Meepo has impacted the electric skateboard industry and esk8 community as a whole.

THE BIRTH OF MEEPO

Meepo (the company) and the original Meepo board were conceived by Keiran Mao. Living and working in Shenzhen, the hardware capital of the world, Keiran had worked for electric skateboard original equipment manufacturers (OEM's) in the past, but he saw their business ethic in sales to be quite lacking. Using his OEM contacts, Keiran decided to build his own electric skateboard.

The performance gained for dollars (or really lack of dollars) spent on the Keiran Eboard prototype certainly raised a few eyebrows on Reddit. Pretty soon everyone was asking for one, and thus Meepo was born!

HOW DID HE DO IT?

Keiran was one of the first Shenzhen-based operators to really reach out to the global esk8 community. He got involved on a personal level, contributing to Reddit and being active on social media. This is important in a grass roots community and was something a lot of similar vendors were failing to do at the time - many still do. However, with Meepo, the board had a builder, and that builder had a name and face. This creates a connection and builds trust in a brand and their products.

​The other thing setting Meepo apart from the more established players was Meepo's business model. It wasn't a new business model. It's actually a very common hardware business model; that is, saving money by negating the need to have bespoke, custom or proprietary parts by sourcing everything you need from existing product lines within existing OEM's. It's certainly harder to make your product unique in any way using this model; Keiran has since discovered this by the level of intense competition that has followed him into this market space, but it does make your product significantly cheaper to build than the premium brands who do use bespoke, custom and proprietary parts, while still being able to rival premium brand performance.

What made Keiran and Meepo so successful was getting the right blend of OEM parts to work together to achieve premium performance for a budget price tag, and (most importantly) by personally taking the finished product directly to the esk8 community. Meepo rivals who arrived on the scene later have been playing catch up ever since!

REMEMBERING THE ORIGINAL MEEPO

Just pause for second and reflect on how far a little company like Meepo has come in less than 12-months. It really is quite extraordinary!

​I have to admit though, I was pretty hesitant to take the plunge. If a so-called "premium" product like the Evolve Bamboo GT can crap out on me straight out of the box, what am I in for with a budget product like the Meepo?

Before and leading up to my purchase I was quite vocal about my concerns regarding the idea of a "budget electric skateboard." I mean, there were already a few "budget electric skateboards" around and their track record wasn't great. Their performance was usually down, quality was low and thus the safety risk was high. Customer service and after sales support was non-existent. Eventually taking the plunge and buying a Meepo was an experiment of sorts. Was this board going to live up to the hype, or was I right all along to be cynical?

​The original Meepo (now known retrospectively as the Meepo 1.0) was a simple, unbranded electric longboard made up of Keiran's blend of generic OEM wholesale parts.

The deck was a 36 inch freeride-style longboard deck with a routed carry handle (an oddity at the time). It was powered by a 10s2p battery pack made up of Samsung 22P or LG MF1 18650 cells (which pack you got was pot luck, but the performance was about the same), which ran through a generic OEM electronic speed controller (ESC) into dual 500 watt 75kV hub motors (which did not have replaceable urethane sleeves). The remote paired with the ESC was a generic, two-speed Winning/Nano clone and all of the traditional longboard parts were also clone parts, e.g. the clone Caliber front truck and accompanying clone Flywheels.

​Meepo used (and still do use) a split enclosure system reminiscent of the Boosted board, which allows for any flexible deck to be used to its full potential.

​As Meepo scaled up its production in those early days, several slightly different versions of the 1.0 were spotted out in the wild. There were the boards from the original batch that had no logo and very rough cut grip tape. Later iterations were logo'd and had a much better overall finish. There were two slightly different deck shapes, one with a rounder nose and tail and one with a more squared-off nose and tail. There were also different urethane colour options at one point, red or black. The Meepo I personally received was a logo'd, rounded nose/tail, LG MF1 powered board with black urethane, much like the one in the header image of this article.​WORTH IT?

Yeah, it was worth it! Not only was I immensely surprised at the boards power and overall performance, I ran the numbers on what it would cost to build a Meepo if I bought all of the individual parts from DIYeboards and assembled the board myself. Even with Meepo's additional shipping fee, the Meepo was still $100 AUD cheaper overall and the board was delivered to me assembled and tested. It also came with a warranty and fantastic customer service and after sales support.

After running the numbers and trialing the board, I officially became a "Meepo convert!" It was less of a question of "why" and more of a question of "why not?" A Meepo board is perfect second or backup board!

Performance wise I easily achieved the claimed 22mph/36kph top speed on the board, and I'm a 207lbs/94kg rider! Range was a different story. The original Meepo's claimed range was 11mi/18km. I could only manage about 8mi/13km out it, and the last 40% of the ride was ruined by terrible battery sag. Nevertheless, 8mi/13km was about twice the real-world range I could get out of a standard Boosted battery with the same aggressive riding style. Nothing to sneeze at!

The torque generated by the hub motors is actually quite astounding! I honestly couldn't believe a board this powerful was available at such a low price! I didn't meet a hill my Meepo couldn't conquer - it was only battery sag that stood in its way.

THE HIGHLIGHTS​The power! The power of the original Meepo and all Meepo's to this day is nothing short of staggering for the price! The spec sheet doesn't do it justice. Anyone who's ridden on these now quite common OEM hub motors through a 10s battery knows what I'm talking about. These motors aren't playing! They pack some serious torque and power! There was even I time where I hesitated in recommending the Meepo to beginners looking to buy their first board. This was mainly due to the boards other shortcomings, which could all in-turn make the board quite unwieldy for a new comer. I'll discuss these shortcoming in the lowlights section.

The smart turn on feature. The ESC used by Meepo comes from an OEM who's signature trademark is the smart turn on feature. Simply put the board down, turn on your remote and in one simple kick-push, you're away - the board has automatically turned on! No need to physically turn the board on or off (as it also turns itself off after a short period of non-use).

​The handle. At first I hated it. A longboard with a handle?! Get the hell outta here! But I found myself using it a lot more than I thought I would. Electric skateboards are heavier than regular longboards. I mean, a handle kind of makes a lot of sense and it certainly made life a lot easier when I had to step off and carry my board through "no skateboard zones."

THE LOWLIGHTS

The deck. I know this is the lowlights section, but I actually quite liked two things about the deck, 1. The length. 36 inches was a nice grab-and-go size compared to other, longer boards, and 2. The arch/bow of the deck - it gave the board that extra travel room when flexing the deck, much like a Boosted. These two good points were unfortunately negated by the horrible convex nature of the deck longitudinally. Where most longboard decks have a nice concave longitudinally to help cradle and lock in your feet, the Meepo was the exact opposite - it was convex! Instead of your feet feeling cradled and locked in, the reverse was true; you felt like you were trying to balance on a bar and were fearful of your feet sliding off every time you leaned into a corner.

The battery sag. The board started strong, but once you're in the 40% or below range of the battery, you may as well get off and walk!

The reverse button. The first version of the OEM Winning/Nano clone remote had a protruding reverse button that was prone to accidental activation. I didn't become a statistic, but many people did!

Non-replaceable urethane sleeves. Okay, look, the motors were dirt cheap to replace anyway, and a lot of other rival electric skateboard companies were having a lot of trouble with their replaceable sleeve hub motors slipping and ghosting. This was never a problem with the earlier Meepo models due to the urethane being fixed, but there is still something frustrating and counter-intuitive about not being able to replace your rear urethane sleeves.​​DID MEEPO CHANGE THE GAME?

Yes, I think Meepo did change the game. Look at it this way, in less than a year they rectified all of the lowlights listed above. There are other electric skateboard companies that still can't master pairing their remotes to their boards correctly! The deck problem, battery sag problem and reverse button problem were all improved with the introduction of the Meepo 1.5. The new Meepo V2 Plus now comes with replaceable urethane sleeves, so that doesn't leave much left on the shelf to complain about. Shipping is now included in the price and overall you're only paying a hairline fraction more now for the V2 Plus than you would have paid for an original Meepo a year ago!

Further, there has been no shortage of people trying to replicate the Meepo business model in the electric skateboard industry since Keiran launched Meepo. As they say, imitation is the sincerest​ form of flattery! Each of the brands now fighting for market share in this space have all managed to find their own differentiating features and benefits over time, but arguably none of them would be here if Keiran and Meepo hadn't paved the way first.

Lastly, I believe Meepo has also changed the game in this way: Meepo has made the "premium" brands sit up and take notice! Before Meepo, if you wanted a budget electric skateboard you had to sacrifice quality and performance. Well, Meepo brought the performance game to budget electric skateboards and the quality has been slowly catching up with each iteration. The established players know this. The more people buying Meepo and Meepo-like boards, the more money is going back to the parent OEM's for research, development and improvement, all of which will go into future boards at the same rock bottom prices. If this trend continues, the gap between "budget" and "premium" will continue to shrink until the only differentiating component will be price.

Where will Meepo be in another year? I don't know, but the current trajectory sure is promising.